The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  “Oh, thieves.” Hartmann snorted contemptuously. “I wouldn’t be concerned about modern sneak-thieves; no market for such a thing, anyhow. I’m thinking of something quite different than that, I assure you.”

  “So is Thorpe apparently. I can’t make him out this time. He has insisted upon putting the Codex into the same room every night with his precious statue from Palestine, until we are ready to put it on exhibition in the main halls. I believe he has some superstition about that statue; thinks it will be a guardian angel or something. He surprised me, really. You do too, if you’re serious. What do you imagine could happen, thieves ruled out?”

  The other man shrugged. “Nothing—possibly. These warnings don’t materialise sometimes but in my opinion that is because we don’t know enough to interpret them correctly. Neither you nor I have any definite knowledge as to what ‘the Empty’ means. Maybe your Codex will disappear to-night, although a thief would be the last thing I should look for in such a case. I don’t know; but I am certain of this, that something, and something more or less unpleasant, will happen on the third night that that bit of ancient wisdom rests in a museum.… After all, a museum is simply an exhibition house for the ignorantly curious, or vice versa.”

  Blake grinned his appreciation. “No reflections, I take it? A lot of us have to earn our bread and butter, you know.… Well, why don’t you sit up with it to-night and see what happens? I’ll get you permission.”

  “Not a chance! I’m going to a ball at the Waldorf to-night; but if I had nothing to do, you can take it I wouldn’t do that. I don’t want to be anywhere near your Codex on the third night.”

  “I believe you’re more than half in earnest,” said Blake, regarding our companion with an estimating glance. “It’s tosh, you know.”

  Hartmann suggested, “Ask Jerry. He has heard both sides.” Turning to me. “What’s your idea, old man; will anything happen, or won’t it?”

  It was an opportunity I couldn’t resist. I said briefly, probably all too briefly, “Nuts!”

  He leaned back, smiling as he lit a cigarette. “Nuts, eh? … Well, Jerry, I’ll give you a thousand you won’t stay up with the Codex and, further, if you do, that something will happen and you won’t be able to prevent it … On?”

  Doubtless I looked as bewildered as I felt at the offer. Before I could pull my wits together and reply, Blake volunteered: “Wish I could take you myself. As a matter of fact, though, I’m taking Jerry’s aunt to the opera to-night and I don’t intend to miss out on that. You might tell her sometime, Jerry, that I paid one grand, extra, for the pleasure of seeing her this evening.”

  “Sure, glad to.” My impatience with the whole business had reached a crucial point and I was feeling fairly irked. Not a word about golf the entire time and in another minute or so I should have to leave. “Look here,” I said, “I can’t afford to take you for a thousand but you’re on for a hundred. I’ll spend the night with your damned Codex and nothing will happen to it at all or about it at all. So what?”

  “So there’s a hundred for me,” came the exasperating answer.

  “Nuts again. Draw your cheque.”

  Suddenly he was serious. “You mean this? You really intend to go through with it?”

  “Naturally.”

  “All right. Now listen to me. A hundred isn’t enough to make me want to have you take a risk. And you’ll be taking one, no matter what you think about it. I’m sorry now that I made the proposition. I’d much rather call it off. Shall we?”

  Let him crawl out like that? “Nothing doing, my lad. It was your suggestion. It’s on now; I’m chaperoning the Codex to-night and collecting in the morning.” If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s these fellows who know more than every one else about everything. Except golf, of course.

  “As you will.” He shrugged, as who remarks that sagacity is wasted on any but sages. “Do you mind, Jerry, if I call you up once or twice during the night? I’d feel a little easier.”

  “Call away. All you want.”

  “It can be arranged, Blake, can’t it?”

  “Easily. I’ll have the phone in the room plugged through before I leave.” He smiled broadly, with more pleasure than I could muster over the tedious performance. “I don’t think, though, that I’ll stay up fretting over Jerry,” he added.

  “No?” The tone had just that accent of the sceptical tinged with the supercilious that is appropriate, I suppose, to these occasions.

  The waiter was bringing our check.

  Late that afternoon Blake showed me the room. As I have said it was L-shaped. There was a roll-top desk in it and a flat one, both obviously unused. Several piles of bundles, pamphlets no doubt or some of the monographs the museum is frequently publishing, were stacked against the long back wall. There were also a few small boxes, various odds and ends that accumulate in a disused apartment. The statue, still in its skeleton crate whose sides were covered with sacking, stood at the farther end of the room beyond the flat desk on which rested the telephone instrument. Life-size, apparently, to judge from the crate. “Thorpe’s sweetheart,” said Blake in a dry voice. “He won’t even let us see it. It’s a particularly nifty one of Astarte, I understand. Came in ten days ago from the Palestine expedition and he insists on unpacking it himself. Hasn’t gotten around to it yet.”

  He laid the Codex on the small table in the other half of the room, near the entrance door. It was contained in a cylinder of wood, black with age, on one side of which two symbols, or letters, had been skilfully inlaid in white shell. “Sacred very-very,” Blake translated them, explaining that the Codex was in its original package, as found. He had taken it carelessly from one of the drawers of his own desk.

  As we turned to the door, he said: “Here’s a note I’ve written for you to Murchison, the guard who will be on duty down here to-night. He’s not here yet. And I’ll introduce you to the supervisor as we go out, so there will be no trouble when you come in after dinner.”

  On the way up to the main entrance I surprised an unwonted expression on Blake’s face. He said abruptly, “Of course, Jerry, I don’t really know much about that Codex or its origin. Something might happen—I suppose. Watch your step. And if anything does begin to break, get out.”

  I stared at him in plain amazement. Through the big doors the sunlight was slanting cheerfully across Fifth Avenue. “Forget it. I’m making the easiest hundred bucks I’ve ever found.… Remember me to Aunt Doris.”

  There wasn’t any sunlight now. I sat back on my chair, staring into black murk. I couldn’t fool myself into believing that I was relaxed; I realised in fact, that my muscles were tensed as if for a spring. Not that I had any idea where to spring or for what purpose.

  Funny, how thick the darkness seemed to be. One’s eyes usually become accustomed to lack of light within a relatively short time, but the window continued as dim as at first, minute after minute. I couldn’t see the table, only a few feet away. This darkness was like the silence—it had weight—it pressed. The cigarettes I had been smoking all evening, perhaps? That was a comforting thought and I clung to it as long as I could. Still, cigarette smoke doesn’t show a preference, in a closed room, for one part rather than for another. I became more and more certain that the gloom was deeper in the corner where the Codex rested than anywhere else. Where the mischief was Murchison? How long did it take him to plug in a new fuse, anyhow?

  A little rustle! Little enough, it would not even have been perceptible ordinarily; in the silence of the room it was not only perceptible but it just couldn’t be put down to imagination. Thank God it didn’t come from the direction of the table. It was only momentary and the silence resumed, as leaden as ever. Had I imagined it? As I strained my ears for a repetition, Blake’s words occurred to me—“If anything breaks, get out.” It also occurred to me that the Codex was between me and the door. The fact that the door was locked, if I remember correctly, didn’t occur to me till later.

  Why hadn’t I brought
a flashlight? I hadn’t brought a thing, actually. A gun would have helped a lot, too. I’m a good shot with an automatic; but a good shot without an automatic is about as useful as a fine yachtsman in the subway. I couldn’t blame myself for that, however. When I had left home in the morning I hadn’t foreseen a night of conflict with the nebulous menace of a piece of manuscript.

  I suppose your eardrums, if you are listening intently, become supersensitised. Something about “sets,” I think. At any rate the noise that broke out was terrific; it seemed as if fifty devils had started screaming simultaneously. I don’t know whether I yelled or not (probably did) but I gave such a jump that I upset the chair and found myself sprawling on the floor, supported by one foot, one knee and one hand. As I scrambled to my feet, still instinctively crouching, I was too scared to do any thinking. It was only when the noise stopped and then began again, that I realised the telephone was ringing.

  I was relieved. For the moment I just straightened up and felt like singing the first song that came into my head. Then I became annoyed, suddenly, at the infernal din the thing was making. I started toward the bend in the room and the instrument beyond it; and of course knocked a couple of bundles off the pile at the corner. With a hearty “Damnation!” I took up the receiver.

  “Hallo.”

  “Hartmann speaking from the Waldorf. Jerry, is everything O.K. so far?”

  That fellow certainly wouldn’t find out how uncomfortable I was, if I could help it. I felt grateful to him, though, for the steadying effect of his silly voice. But I wasn’t prepared yet for much talking. “Certainly. Why not?”

  “You’re sure? Nothing a bit out of the way has happened?”

  “Well, the lights seem to be out for the moment.”

  “What? … My God!… ”

  I waited but there wasn’t any more.

  “What do you mean, my God?”

  The quiet over the wire continued for so long that I began considering the possibility that he had left the phone. Then his voice came through excitedly.

  “Jerry, get out of that room! Listen, Jerry, please, please will you get out? I’ll pay you the hundred, I’ll——. Get out now! Before it happens. Now!”

  I’ll admit I had a hard time answering that one, but I did. I said, “I won’t get out at all. Anyhow, I can’t; the door’s locked——”

  “Oh my God! You say the door’s locked?” Hartmann’s voice rose into a kind of wail that, under the circumstances, wasn’t the pleasantest sound I could have thought of. “Jerry, Jerry! Listen to me; listen carefully. If you can’t get out, you must do this. You must; understand, you must! Don’t go near the Codex. Get as far away from it as you can, even if only across the room. And lie down on the floor. Do you hear me, Jerry? You must lie down on the floor; get as——”

  Click.

  And there I was, inanely banging the hook of the telephone up and down. It was dark as pitch in the room. There was silence over the wire. There isn’t much that is deader than a dead telephone line, but somehow the silence over the wire didn’t seem half as dead as the silence in the room.

  I couldn’t go one way, nor could I go the other. I stood there, with the telephone receiver still in my hand. The telephone had gone now, too. The lights had gone, the guard had gone, the telephone had gone; what price those “forces of civilisation”? What is unavailable, it was being borne in upon me, might just as well not exist.… What could he possibly mean, about lying down? Why lie down? It didn’t——

  The lights came on.

  Instantaneously. Just as they had gone off.

  Light is truly a blessed thing. I only realised that I had been trembling when I stopped, after the first dazzle was over. There were the blank walls, the two black windows, the piles of bundles, the crated statue. All motionless, with the stolidity of the prosaic. It was all right; it was all right, I repeated, it was all right. I drew a deep breath of the heavy air and expelled it in a long “whew.” Automatically I put the receiver on the phone. I started back to my chair in the other part of the room.

  Right then I got the biggest shock of my life. The table was absolutely bare. The Codex had vanished!

  I jumped to the door and shook it; it was locked as tightly as ever. I turned and stood stock still, staring down at the table, disbelieving my eyes.

  From somewhere I heard an unmistakable chuckle.

  I whirled around. And saw him.

  There he stood, leaning negligently against the corner of the wall where the room turned, and regarding me with amusement in his grey eyes. A tall, lean man in an ordinary tweed suit. A sensitive face, ending in a long, strong jaw.

  A number of thoughts chased themselves through my head in the space of that first second. Amazement was one of them. How had he gotten in? And if he had (which was impossible, unless he could walk through locked doors), how had he managed to get behind me? He hadn’t been in the other half of the room when I had put down the telephone receiver; and during my trip from the flat desk to the door, he could not have passed me, for the lights had been on then. Hostility was another of the thoughts. Had I not been overwrought by what had gone before, I might have reflected that, once in, he certainly couldn’t get out again until the guard returned, and I might have acted differently. But as it was, I would probably have flung myself upon anything in the room that moved or betrayed an appearance of animation.

  I flung myself upon the man at the corner, glad that he no more resembled an Aztec bird-god in armour than did any one else to be met with on Broadway in the daytime. Here was some one I could deal with adequately, at any rate.

  It soon turned out that I was wrong in that, however. Unexpectedly as my sudden attack must have been, he slipped back in a quick turn and landed a powerful blow against my shoulder. I got in with a few then on my own account, while he contented himself with little more than parrying. Within a short time, however, he appeared to have come to the conclusion that I meant business. He stepped closer; just as I was launching a smash toward his chin, he ducked with an agility that caught me unprepared, grasped my arm in a grip like a vice, and twisted.

  The arm was bent back behind me. My face was forced suddenly forward and collided smartly with a bony knee that moved into its path at the proper instant. Then the knee moved on and I was forced to the floor with my opponent kneeling over me. Pain shot along my arm from the wrist and began spreading over the shoulder. I grunted with it and tried in vain to twist away; all I accomplished was to rub my face along the floor until it was turned once more in the direction of the doorway.

  I had just achieved this position, surely no improvement upon its predecessor, when the door opened. Murchison stood in the entrance, his mouth partly open in amazement. But not for long. Like the other museum guards, he was a special officer and the gun that came up in his hand was business-like and steady. Although it was pointing too near my own head for comfort, I have seldom been more pleased with the sight of any weapon.

  “Get up outta that,” commanded Murchison. “Stand away.”

  They were the first words, except my short replies to Hartmann, that had been spoken in the room since he had left.

  “Who is the man?” Murchison demanded.

  I said: “I don’t know. I never saw him before.” I had gotten to my feet now and crossed over to the guard beside the doorway. Opposite us the fellow stood nonchalantly in the centre of the room, his hands in his coat pockets, and regarded us quizzically but with evident good humour. Murchison still had him covered.

  “Don’t worry, he’s got the Codex,” I went on grimly. “It was here when you left to see to the lights. When they came on, it was gone and he had gotten into the room somehow.”

  “Search him.… Up with your hands, my man.”

  I made the search, to which he acceded willingly enough, with that amused half-smile still on his lips. Most of it I conducted with the left hand, for my right arm was growing no less painful and was now beginning to swell. There was no sign of the Code
x; and since it was a good two and a half feet long and a number of inches in diameter, it could scarcely have been concealed on his person. I found a bunch of keys and took from his coat pocket (where his own hand had so recently been) a wicked little automatic. I realised abruptly that he could easily have shot down Murchison, and myself too, a few seconds before. I looked at him perplexedly; this was certainly a funny sort of chap.

  I tried his keys on the door immediately. None of them fitted and I tossed the bunch back to him. There was no other key on him. He said, “Thanks, old man,” and pocketed them.

  “Now,” he went on, “you’ll want to search the room. You have my word that I won’t interfere, nor will I attempt to get away. Let’s get it over with.”

  The easy sincerity in his voice impressed me, but Murchison, I noticed, continued to keep a wary eye on him. We began at the door and went completely through the room. Every bundle was moved, every box was opened, the desks were thoroughly searched and also moved about. No sign whatsoever of the Codex could we find.

  When we came at last to the crated statue at the end of the room, there was a long slit down one side of the sacking. Before I could say anything, our prisoner remarked conversationally, “Yes, that’s where I was. Of course. The lady with me looks hot but feels cold. If you have to lean against her for a few hours.”

  I hadn’t an idea what he meant until I enlarged the slit somewhat and peered inside the crate. I recalled vaguely that Astarte was never considered as a symbol of the virginal and this conception, chiselled some thousands of years ago in Palestine, even from the small glimpse I could get, was sizzling. It struck me as a side thought that the basement was probably destined to be her permanent home at the Metropolitan.

  The crate yielded nothing either. And that was the end. Definitely, the Codex had vanished from this locked room.